2023 America's Seed Fund Week Agency Reverse Pitch: HHS

You. Hello, I'm Stephanie Fertig, the HHS Small Business Program Lead and today I'm going to talk about how Health and Human Services, known as hhs, powers America's Seed Fund. The HHS mission is to enhance the health and well being of all Americans and the Small Business Program supports this mission by helping get great innovations into the hands of the patients and clinicians, caregivers and researchers that need them. There are four components of HHS with an sbir, nih, cdc, FDA and ACL the largest component. NIH also has an STTR program. The HHS Small Business Programs are one of the largest sources of early stage capital for life sciences in the US over $1.3 billion each year. Many companies are early stage and new to our program. Unlike other agencies, HHS is generally not the final purchasers of the products and services developed through America's Seed Fund. Our recipients leverage government funding to attract the partners and investors necessary to take their their great innovations to market and many companies have done this. I encourage you to go to our Small Business Success Stories page which really showcases a wide variety of the companies and modalities that NIH supports through the program. One of the features of our program is flexibility. At NIH we have multiple ways to enter a standard Phase one, a fast track which combines the Phase one and Phase two into one proposal and the direct to Phase II for those companies that have already done the feasibility needed for the full research and development. Regardless of how a company gets to the Phase ii, we have programs to help bridge the gap between the Phase II support and a partner investor or even the marketplace. We also have flexibility regarding the budget as NIH and CDC have a waiver to exceed the SBA budget guidelines for selected topics. Want to get started? Our website is a wealth of information including the current open funding opportunities. While we do have specific funding opportunities, the vast majority of the funding goes to investigator initiated grant applications through our omnibus solicitations and we have three standard receipt dates a year. There are also resources on our webpage to help you submit an annotated form set walks you step by step through the documentation needed. Application instructions describe each field and sample applications help you determine what the final proposal should look like. We also have applicant assistance programs to help support novice applicants with submission. We want our companies to succeed and support technical and business assistance either through funding in the grant to use a specific vendor or through our centralized tab of services and we have those for both Phase one and Phase two. Finally, we also offer a variety of other innovator support, regulatory and business development consultants, entrepreneurial support programs, and even industry partnering and investment opportunities. We want our recipients to succeed. The most important piece of advice I can give you Talk to us. Talk to a Program officer well, in advance of applying, we're here to help. There's a list of program contacts on our website, but you can always email seedinfoih.gov and we can connect you with the right person. So please connect with us and take that first step towards taking your innovation to market.